Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt has outlined what he sees as being the ideal startup in five years’ time.
Schmidt says a key quality of a future successful tech company will be a reliance on crowdsourced data. He gave the example of a company that sources data about skin cells and then uses machine learning to process that information.
A good company would “use Android, iOS, and machine learning but use the crowd to learn something trivial,” Schmidt said onstage at Startup Grind Europe on Wednesday.
One hypothetical that Schmidt provided was a dermatology company funded with $1 million (£700,000). He suggested that the company could pay dermatologists $1 each for information on skin cells and the problems they had and then use machine learning to develop a recognition system that could take an image of a skin cell and diagnose a problem.
“You could sell that service to dermatologists because it’s more accurate than an individual diagnosis,” he said. “That model is a highly likely candidate to become a $100 billion (£70 billion) corporation.”
Elsewhere in his onstage interview, Schmidt heaped praise on the British startup DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014 for $500 million (£352 million). Schmidt said DeepMind was “one of the greatest British success stories of the modern age.”
This story first appeared on Business Insider.